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dita message


Subject: Re: [dita] who complains about complexity of DITA?

I'm also curious about this. Even before we had constraints, we had basic DITA modularity, which lets you include or exclude whole domains of elements at a time. And the doctypes we package with the spec do exactly that.

Simple number of elements in the spec as a whole shouldn't be a measure of complexity for either authors or architects, since you only include or work with the elements that matter for your domain. For example, the learning and training specializations don't increase complexity for authors or architects in basic tech comm.

So do we really have a complexity problem, that is it's too hard to use DITA or create new DITA specializations? Or do we have a communication problem, about how to use DITA (start small, include what you need, don't try to use stuff you don't need)? Or are there other problems, outside the domain of the spec, like customizing processing flows, that get reflected back on the spec even though it's really something outside our control?

I don't mean to dismiss complaints about complexity, but like you I think we need to understand the actual motivations/causes of the complaints before we can usefully react.

Michael Priestley, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM)
Lead IBM DITA Architect

From: "Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com>
To: <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>, <dita-adoption@lists.oasis-open.org>
Date: 12/06/2010 11:01 AM
Subject: [dita] who complains about complexity of DITA?



